On September 20, Apple released the latest versions of its flagship products, the iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Pro. As others have already mentioned, the much-touted and lovingly hyped ‘Apple Intelligence’ features that dominated the ads for iPhone 16 were completely missing on launch day and are presumably scheduled to be released at the end of October, more than a full month after the product launch.
So what’s all this Apple-flavored AI fuss about? Some of the cool new tricks you’ll apparently be able to perform with ‘Apple Intelligence’ include:
Writing tools: whether you’re writing a text message to your mom or a Slack message to a coworker, now you can reformat it to sound like the exact average of all human communication ever written.
Clean up in photos: with a simple button click, your wife can finally wipe that smile off your face after she caught you using the same tool to remove that lipstick off your collar.
Natural language search in photos: after activating this option you only have to wait a mere 48 hours for the AI to train on your photos and then you can search for “that shed I built in 2022” in a mere 5 seconds instead of, say 25 or 30 seconds.
Summarize emails: why bother to read emails when the sender probably used AI to write them?
Generate auto-responses to emails: why bother writing your own reply when you didn’t even read the email?
These are all exciting new additions to iOS. As Sam Altman recently declared from his bunker in Nevada, this technology is going to change the world in unimaginable ways, and we are just getting started. But forget about fixing the environment or discovering new physics, Apple is bringing us the future in just a few more months with amazing custom emojis!
To add insult to injury, Apple is reportedly rolling out the AI features piecemeal over the next several months, with the Siri enhancements (previewed at the WWDC in June of this year) not available until March of 2025. That’s 6 months of waiting for updates that were supposed to be the main selling point of the device and halfway through the phone’s shelf-life, just in time for the next model to be released.
This is a strange new strategy for Apple, which until now has had a good track record of delivering new features on time and with much more pizzazz. What’s more, it seems that Apple executives might be aware that a certain percentage of consumers are just going to wait until next year to open their wallets.
We’re all for automating drudgery, but let’s be honest, the AI features of Apple’s iOS 18 are squarely aimed at replacing much of our day-to-day human interaction with a cacophony of robots. Apple, like Google, is training us to press the ‘easy’ button to remove all effort from the basic gestures that make us authentically human. They are stepping stones to commodifying more and more aspects of our lives.
How can any future online interaction be considered genuine if we completely outsource our public persona to machines? And why stop at written words? You can just as easily create a voice clone or a video avatar to represent you. What happens when everyone starts doing the same?
There is a peculiar obsession in the tech industry with trying to squeeze utilitarian efficiency from every human endeavor while disregarding our long-held aesthetic or emotional attachment to life in all its creative and instinctual messiness. Contrary to what some tech companies might have you believe, most regular human biological abilities are still quite relevant and are not yet obsolete.